I had high hopes for it back when its developers were still actively working on it, and looking for feedback from the user community. Unfortunately they ignored all the game-design advice we gave them, and only used the beta community as free alpha and beta-testers. When it finally released it looks like sales weren't what they'd expected and aside from a couple of patches shortly after release, it has been pretty much abandoned by the developers.

Fortunately the game they did release is somewhat moddable. Community mods and unofficial patches can fix many of the bugs left in the game.

Pros:The graphics are updated and it is fairly pretty

Cons:The gameplay is somewhat lacking. From a game mechanics point of view it ranks well below MoO2 in my opinion. Though races may be different and it has different victory types, the strategy for them all winds up the same -- maximize your population growth.The game is really resource hungry. I can barely run it on my laptop. The game leaks memory, and can quickly get up over 5gb of memory use in a couple hours of play.The real-time tactical ship combat is difficult to work with, the UI is horrible, and players do not even really have full control of their ships -- i.e. they always shoot at 'closest target' regardless of what you try to target them to.Late in the game it can be really micromanage heavy. Lack of a sane building strategy or customization of the colony auto-build system makes it worthless. And maximum build queue of only 4 doesn't help for the manual build orders.

All in all I had fun with it for a while, but ultimately went back to MoO2.Back when I bought it through steam, it came wiht the MoO1-3 line as well, which makes it a bit more worthwhile.

It's an enjoyable enough game, definitely looks nice. However it uses a LOT of resources. I accidentally left my word processor open and had to restart my computer. Also, I loved the GNN reports but had to disable them as they started to freeze the game.

I never had pollution problems, so I don't know if I was just how I was building, or if it's a feature that was never fully implemented. Oddly managing my planets populations didn't feel too micromanagy, but balancing my costs did. I am glad FO does not use money.

Leaders were interesting. However I think I would rather be able to have more, or have their effects be stronger. You don't really get to "choose", so much as decide weather or not you want a particular leader. Also I got a whole lot form neighboring aliens, and a couple of times wound up with most of my leadership being other species. I think once all because all my early ones were really bad. Which honestly mead me feel like immigration probably should have been a thing. Or maybe have it impact, or be impacted by my diplomatic status?

Spies are expensive. The combined research, production of the building, training and pay are a lot. Really the counter intelligence and the prisoner exchange bargaining chip in negotiations might actually be more worth it in the long run than espionage. It does give you a good advantage if you can steal tech or sabotage an empire early on, but later in the game it's kind of pointless.

Diplomacy needs more options. Like seriously, so many problems could have probably been solved if I could have just asked the Darlok to stop poking the bear (in that case bug). Their empires is like 5x yours, just don't. Likewise asking empires you know, for contacts that they know, would have helped move things along, a lot. Diplomatic options are not well balanced, or at least whatever balance they are going for isn't clear. I'm not a complete fan of Stellaris' point-buy diplomacy but more transparency in the diplomacy screen would have helped, as I found a few times where I had great relations with other empires, and all the right prerequisites but couldn't get them to make an alliance and never did figure out why.

_________________All of my contributions should be considered released under creative commons attribution share-alike license, CC-BY-SA 3.0 for use in, by and with the Free Orion project.

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